Digital art uses digital technology for artistic creations and presentations. The field in general, covers areas of painting, sculpture, audio/music, video/cinema, publishing, textile designing, animation etc. Digital art is the intersection of computer programming, mathematics and art.
Context Free Art(CFA) is a free software for for generating digital art in the form of 2-d images. Based on a simple set of rules, software creates imageries. These rules can be combinatorial and/or iterative. You can generate new shapes from exisiting shapes. Beautiful and compilcated shapes including fractal images can be generated using these simple rules.
SPACE conducted workshops on CFA at various colleges in Malabar as a experiment. The response has been encouraging. The majority of our students find mathematics to dull and drab and disconnected from real life. The subject appears to be invisible and intangible in spite of its enormous applications in real life. A tool like CFA can help them to understand the relevance of mathematical concepts like affine transformation (scaling, shearing and rotation), homogenous co-ordinates, matrices, vectors etc. and to visualize what these concepts mean. They would be able to graphically visualize the affect of scaling, shearing, rotation and mirror reflection on their computer monitor. The students can also learn that in the case of iterations, the value of the initial seed can have drastic affect on the final outcome (introduction to chaos theory). Such an experience will make the learning of mathematics more enjoyable.
If you are interesting in doing a workshop on Context Free Art in your school or college, contact us.
